Boomers change the scene

Saturday

Mar 23, 2013 at 12:00 PM

The American Baby Boomers are an amazing generation. This cohort brought significant cultural changes and attitudes, some for the greater good, some not so much. Among the many credits of the Boomers are that they became the generation that doubled the divorce rate, and as such, have created a whole new understanding of “midlife” marriage. As this group continues to age, their impact on relationships continues, not only in the proliferation of ED medication commercials, but in redefining later-midlife marriage. Prior to the Boomer generation, it was a safe assumption that any couple nearing or experiencing retirement were in a long-term marriage, often with 40 years or more to their credit. That fact has become more and more of a rarity. Much as someone suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder must count things, academics just can’t help themselves and must categorize and explain. So when confronted with the recent novelty of longer-term, later-midlife marriage, marriage scholars attempt to define and describe how this anomaly could occur. A disclaimer: Jim is an academic, so he can empathize with the marriage scholars. At least, that is the explanation we are falling back on to explain his compulsion to ponder this issue in print. Although we typically attribute our sources, since we are going to poke fun at this week’s source, we’ve decided to leave it as an “unnamed source close the social sciences academy.”In a not-so-stunning conceptual model for understanding these couples in later-midlife marriages, authors in a respected social science journal recently published that there may be multiple pathways to explain these freaks of nature (our words). One of their working hypotheses is that couples who make it that long may have made it through life fairly unstressed, therefore storing up more tolerance for the difficulties of later-midlife (such as retirement, health issues, caring for aging parents or boomerang children). Oh. Another hypothesis is that some couples may experience stressors early on in their marriage and they developed heightened coping mechanisms that serve them well later on. Wow. Is it just us or are these conclusions somewhat obvious? One might speculate that if a couple made the remarkable achievement of making it to later-midlife, that they either had past problems in life, or not, and that having these problems, or not having problems, might impact their relationship. We should not be too snarky given that this was in a respected scholarly journal, but the article did not exactly provide the secret answers to long-term marriage. So for our stunning conclusions this week: Boomers are changing how we understand life. And sometimes, the academy can be really dull.

James Burg, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue, Fort Wayne. His wife, Audora, is a freelance writer. You may contact them at marriage@charter.net

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